Plot Challenge of the Week

Well, I finished Walter Rauschenbusch’s A Theology for the Social Gospel yesterday, and I have to admit that I thoroughly did not enjoy it. I think that my major issue with Rauschenbusch is that, as far as I can tell, for R (my girlfriend and I have been calling him R because Rauschenbusch is a lot to text on a regular basis) theology has no actual basis in reality. He believes in the idea of God, but he sees theology as a fairy tale that can be rewritten and reinterpreted based upon preference. He believes in the historicity of scripture (i.e. that scripture is an actual set of historical documents that record the ideas of actual people) and the historical Christ, but Christ was divine because it is a belief that is convenient for R’s system, not because God is an actual entity that takes offense at sin, but chose to show mercy by taking the punishment for sin upon himself. R chooses theological concepts not because he believes that they are what the scriptures actually say, or because they best describe the reality of God, but because he finds them interesting or convenient. I find attitude very frustrating. Anyway, I started Tim Keller’s Ministries of Mercy today, hopefully I’ll have it finished by Saturday. I’ll also be starting Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics tomorrow. So, my life is certainly exciting. Anyway, here are the rules for today’s challenge:

Your challenge: Take a movie, book, short story, play (preferably something religious) that you love, and identify each character and significant plot point. Now, identify the three most significant, pivotal events in the story, and work your way back through the plot, but change those three events. For instance, in Romeo and Juliet you might change the death of Tibedo so that he lives. Now, work your way back through the story step by step and figure out how the characters would react to those changed plot points. How would they react (in character)? How does this change the overall events of the story? Feel free to use this as an impetus to write some up a new story entirely, but the goal here is to see how character’s themselves help to shape the plot of a story.